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Spin strategy

Columbus school officials try to sway public opinion before facts are known

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Saturday October 13, 2012 6:13 AM

The investigation into alterations of student-attendance data by Columbus City Schools and other
districts is incomplete, and so is the determination of whether there was intentional wrongdoing by
Columbus school officials. But that hasn’t stopped officials from trying to spin the story as
favorably as possible. People should avoid buying into it just yet.

The stakes grew higher on Wednesday when Ohio Auditor Dave Yost told guests at the Columbus
Metropolitan Club that his office has found evidence that some changes to attendance data at
schools statewide were made, in his words, “with mal-intent” — to make their numbers on state
report cards look better.

But with the release last week of a partial report, which found widespread, undocumented
attendance changes at 10 Columbus middle schools, the public stance of Superintendent Gene Harris
and other officials has shifted.

In an Aug. 6 interview with
The Dispatch, Harris declared, “There’s no way I would ever condone this,” referring to
changes that had been made en masse, just before the district had to report data to the state
Department of Education. She added, “There’s no way in heck that I’m going to find that some of
these practices are legitimate, that I’m going to defend them.”

Following Yost’s report Thursday — and, it should be noted, after weeks of secret meetings
between the Board of Education and a lawyer hired for unspecified work related to the attendance
probe — Harris released a statement the same day focusing instead on the possibility that employees
who made questionable changes to students’ records might have thought such action was proper.

Harris also pointed out that 92.3 percent of students at the 10 schools had their attendance
reported properly, as if this mitigates the questionable changing of records for more than 7
percent of the student body.

Meanwhile, Robert “Buzz” Trafford, the attorney with whom the school board has been conferring
in secret, has produced a variety of excuses and blame-shifting. The board’s contract with Trafford
allows him to be paid up to $100,000 to generate this fog.

Overall, the response seems an attempt to divert public attention from the core question of
whether employees knowingly falsified individual students’ records to improve a school’s standing
on state report cards, either for its attendance rate or its passing rate on standardized
tests.

Getting to the answer is important, not just to hold district officials accountable, but because
a school’s performance numbers have important side effects.

Schools with falsely inflated performance scores give parents a false sense of confidence. Bogus
scores could give teachers and administrators pay bonuses they didn’t earn; conversely, they could
deprive the school and its students of some needed help, in the form of grants aimed at
low-performing schools, eligibility for free tutoring and other programs.

The unintended consequences go on and on. Under the state’s school-voucher program, cash
payments to go toward private-school tuition are reserved for students at failing schools. If a
failing school’s numbers are pushed upward by attendance-rigging, its students would be deprived of
a shot at a voucher.

Families and taxpayers can’t make good decisions about schools without an accurate understanding
of their performance. Yost’s final report should shed more light on how schools really performed,
as well as how the false numbers came about.